“Yes. He came to me knowing less than you do but enough to have guessed the significance of the fact that his uncle and grandmother were killed at the same time.”
“They weren’t, you know,” I said. “She died before him by fifteen minutes. That’s what the police report said, but the coroner was bribed to find otherwise.”
He closed his eyes. “If I had known that twenty years ago, I would’ve gone to the police. How could Robert have been so clumsy?”
“I think he was desperate,” I said. “Unnerved. If he’d been accused then, he might have fallen apart.”
“And your friend would be alive,” he said. “Now, I’m sorry.”
And after that, there didn’t seem to be anything left to say.
I left the professor and walked back to the student union where I found a phone and called Terry Ormes at the police station. She was out in the field so I left a message. Sonny Patterson at the D.A.’s office was out to lunch. I set up an appointment to see him the next morning. No one was answering at Aaron Gold’s office. I hung up the phone feeling cheated, like an actor robbed of his audience. I stood indecisively in front of the phone booth until the smells from the cafeteria behind me reminded me it was time to eat.
I bought two hamburgers and two plastic cups of beer and took them to a comer table. As I ate, I put the case together the way I would present it to Sonny the next day.
It was a simple tale of greed. Robert Paris had been disinherited by his wife, Christina, in favor of his two sons, Nicholas and Jeremy. Nicholas posed no problems. He was mentally ill and could be easily controlled by the judge. Jeremy, however, had to be gotten rid of. Paris had to invalidate Christina’s will in such a way as to strike her bequest to Jeremy, and any of his heirs, so that he himself might inherit that portion of Christina’s estate through intestacy. Christina and Jeremy were killed in an accident to which there was but one witness who himself was later killed. A crooked coroner presided at the inquest and manipulated the times of death, making it appear that Christina and Jeremy died simultaneously. By operation of the rule of simultaneous death, Christina’s estate passed to her remaining family, half to the judge through intestacy and half to his younger son, Nicholas, by operation of Christina’s bequest which was not affected by the invalidity of the bequest to Jeremy.
Nicholas was then committed to an asylum and his wife, Katherine, blackmailed into a divorce. I had no doubt that the judge had been appointed conservator of Nicholas’s estate. By the time the wheels of his machinations came to a stop, Judge Paris had secured control of his wife’s fortune.
There was only the smallest of hitches: Hugh. In Hugh’s case the judge acted more subtly. He took the boy from his mother, sexually abused him, and then set him adrift in a series of private schools far from his home. The judge made sure that Hugh had all the money he could spend. Rootless, without direction, with too much money and not enough judgment, Hugh became a wastrel, a hype. He very nearly self-destructed. But not quite. He came home, pieced together the story of his grandfather’s crimes and suddenly became a serious threat to Robert Paris. So he too was killed.
That was the story. The evidence would not be as seamless or easily put together. It would come in bits and pieces, fragments of distant conversations, scribbled notes, fading memories. The investigation would be laborious and involve, undoubtedly, protracted legal warfare. Sonny might look at it, see the potential quagmire and look the other way. But I doubted it. I knew, from trying cases against him, that he didn’t run from a fight. And he liked to win.
At least my part would be over. I would finally be able to exorcise that last image of Hugh lying in the morgue.
I got up and went back to the phone. This time Terry was in her office.
“Listen, I’m glad you called back,” she began.
“I’m seeing Patterson in the morning. I’m going to lay out the whole story for him and I’d like you to be there.”
“What story is that?”
“Robert Paris killed his wife, his son and his grandson. I know exactly how it happened and why. I’m sure Patterson will order the investigation into Hugh’s death reopened.”
“I don’t think so,” Terry said softly. “Where are you?”
“At the university. The student union. Why?”
“Have you seen this morning’s paper?”
“No, not yet. I’ve been on the move since I got up.”
“You better take a look at it.”
“Why?”
“Robert Paris is dead. The judge is dead.”
“What?”
“Early this morning. A stroke. Henry? You still there?”
“Yeah,” I mumbled, looking across the patio of the student union to the courtyard. There were three flag poles there, one for a flag of the United States, one for a flag of California and the third for the university’s flag. Having spent most of the day on campus I’d passed those poles maybe four or five times not noticing until this moment that the three flags flew at half-mast.
8
There was a burst of organ music as the doors to the chapel opened and the archbishop of San Francisco, flanked by red- skirted altar boys, stepped blinking into the bright light of midday. The university security guards who had been lounging in the vicinity of the doors now closed ranks, forming a loose cordon on either side of the funeral procession.
I was standing against a pillar next to a camera crew from a local T.V. station. A blond woman spoke softly into a microphone. The television lights exploded at the appearance of the first dignitaries emerging from the darkness of the church.
The mayor of San Francisco, an alumna, came out on the arm of the president of the university. Following a step or two behind came the governor, a graduate of the law school, walking alone, working the crowd with discreet waves and a slack smile. Next came a coterie of old men who, even without their robes, had the unmistakable, self-important gait of judges. For a moment afterward the threshold was empty. Then came eight elderly men dressed in similar dark suits, white shirts and black ties, shouldering the gleaming rosewood coffin.
Inside that box were the mortal remains of Robert Wharton Paris, who had been eulogized that morning by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the most distinguished Californians of his time. No mention was made that the judge’s sole surviving descendant, his son, was locked up in an asylum in Napa. Instead, the newspapers looked back on what was, inarguably, a dazzlingly successful life.
Robert Paris, who was born into a poor family of farmers in the San Joaquin valley eighty years earlier, worked his way through Linden University, went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and returned to the United States to take a law degree from Harvard, all before his twenty-fifth birthday. Hired as an instructor in property law at the university law school he quickly rose to the rank of full professor. In the process, he married Christina Smith, the granddaughter of Grover Linden and daughter of Jeremiah Smith, the university’s first president.
Paris left the law school to form, with two of his colleagues, a law firm in San Francisco that now occupied its own building in the heart of the financial district. He resigned from the firm to accept appointment to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was a distinguished jurist frequently mentioned as a potential candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court but he was too conservative for the liberal Democrats who then occupied the White House. When he was finally offered a position on the Court by a Republican president, he was forced to decline, citing age and physical infirmity. Shortly afterwards he left the court of appeals and spent the last decade of his life in virtual seclusion. Now, he was dead.
Greater than the man was what he represented, the Linden fortune. The media estimated the extent of that fortune at between five-hundred million and one billion dollars, but so cloaked in secrecy were its sources and tributaries that no one really knew. There was so much money that it had acquired an air of fable as though it were stored not in banks, trust companies and investment management firms, but hidden away in caves as if it were pirate treasure.